Broadcast Agenda 2021
Not wanting to end up in the press as the example of a perfect Super Spreader event, Data Relay is going online to Broadcast directly to you.
On the week commencing April 19th 2021 we’ll be broadcasting from 5 old English kingdoms. Every night we’ll be having Data Relay alumni presenting sessons on the latest Data Platform technology and best practices.
Each night we’ll open the virtual doors at 18:45, with the first session starting at 19:00, a break for any biological needs, and the second session starting at 20:00.
Anyone from anywhere is welcome to sign up, and you can come to as many of the events as you want.
All times are British Summer time (UTC+1)
- Monday 19/04/2021 – Wessex
- Tuesday 20/04/2021 – Mercia
- Wednesday 21/04/2021 – Northumbria
- Thursday 22/04/2021 – East Anglia
- Friday 23/04/2021 – Dumnonia
Wessex – Monday 19/04/2021
Infrastructure as Code: An introduction to Terraform
Building reliable and repeatable infrastructure deployments that can be transitioned through Development, Test, and into production is becoming increasingly essential. There are many options including PowerShell, ARM, Cloud Formation and many more that you can use depending on your cloud of choice. But what if you want vendor lock in? Enter Terraform. An open source Infrastructure as code platform that works with Azure, AWS, and others as well as on-premises environments.
Together we will work through the what, why, and how of infrastructure automation with Terraform for building solutions. We will build a data platform solution and look at how we can transition through environments with Azure DevOps and integrate this into development and operations processes that will let you concentrate on delivering more value to your users.
Custom Logging within DataBricks
Within Azure you can connect your Databricks workspace directly to Log Analytics via Azure Diagnostic Settings, but the results aren’t always as granular as we need. In this session I explore how Custom Logging can be applied within Databricks and written to Log Analytics, accompanying what Azure already gives us out of the box. We’ll look at core logging concepts including Structured Logging, and how it can enrich your ETL processes
Register for Wessex at Eventbrite
Mercia – Tuesday 20/04/2021
Brilliant Report, can I print it?
How to handle the request to print the dynamic report you spent hours crafting, introduces using Power Automate with Power BI and using Paginated Reports.
Azure SQL Database
Azure SQL Database is a general-purpose relational database service in Microsoft Azure. With Microsoft’s cloud-first strategy, the newest capabilities of SQL Server are released first to Azure SQL Database and then to SQL Server itself. During this presentation you will get to see the differences in security, high availability, performance and monitoring of this cloud-first solution. You will also learn about the different service tiers and compute levels that are specific to Azure SQL Database and learn about the different methods that you could use to migrate to Azure and performance tuning tips for the DBA.
Register for Mercia at Eventbrite
Northumbria – Wednesday 21st April 2021
Kubernetify your Containers
We have all now had a play around with Docker and Containers or at least heard about them.
This demo heavy session will walk through some of the challenges around managing container environments and how Kubernetes orchestration can help alleviate some of the pain points.
We will be talking about what Kubernetes is and how it works and through the use of demos we will:
Highlight some of the issues with getting setup
Deploying/Updating containers in Kubernetes (on-Prem as well as AKS using Azure DevOps)
Persisting your SQL Server data
How to avoid making the same mistakes as I have
Does this look weird to you? An introduction to Anomaly Detection
Discovering anomalies is a critical part of systems monitoring, financial auditing, and more. In this session, we will gain an understanding of what constitutes an anomaly, starting with a general concept of anomalies and then moving into technical definitions. We will review techniques for detecting anomalies for both time series and non-series data and implement a simple anomaly detector in .NET. Finally, we will compare these results against Microsoft’s anomaly detector in Azure Cognitive Services.
Register for Northumbria at Eventbrite
East Anglia – Thursday 22/04/2021
Mental Health and Wellness in IT: Safeguarding our most precious resource
One in four Americans suffers from a mental health challenge each year. In the tech community, this number rises to 42% and rises to 48% in the UK. Mental health challenges in IT is a worldwide problem. The stigma associated with discussions around mental health, as well as how it can negatively impact your work and home life, make people reluctant to discuss the topic. Now is the time to start discussing mental health in tech and how to take advantage of the opportunity to safeguard our most precious resource: people.
We’ll discuss how mental health affects job quality, including sharing examples from my professional life. We’ll discuss the four primary workplace factors which play a pivotal role in mental health challenges in the tech community. I’ll provide tips on what is best to say and not say to people you know whose lives are being affected by their mental health. Lastly, we’ll cover how to make your workplace a safe place where mental health can be talked about and how to encourage your company to offer resources to help maintain everyone’s mental health
Edge of Tomorrow, An introduction to Graph Databases
It is an unspoken fact in the world of data that relational databases are inherently bad at handling highly related data!
But there is a better way.
Graph Databases were born from the NoSQL movement and provide a highly efficient way to model and query data with complex relationships using the concept of Edges and Nodes.
In this practical demo-driven session, we will take a look at several implementations of Graph Databases and concepts, looking to understand how and why we should use them.
We will specifically take a look at SQL Graph Database (part of SQL Server and Azure SQL), Azure Cosmos DB, TinkerGraph, and Neo4j and demo the SQL Graph Extensions, Cypher, and Gremlin query languages.
If you are looking to getting started using graph databases then this is the session for you!
Register for East Anglia at Eventbrite
Dumnonia – Friday 23/04/2012
Developing code to keep your DBA happy
In this session we will attempt to include lots of advice and guidance on how to write code that will easily get approved by your DBA prior to release to production. We’ll cover Unit tests, Continuous Integration, Source Control and some coding best practice.
This will be quite a fast paced session but will aim to give you a taster of what you should include to increase the acceptance rate of your code by the approvers and how to ensure your code does what it should and that future changes don’t break it.
Introduction to Azure Arc enabled Data Services
Azure Arc Enabled Data Services allow you to provide the capabilities, functionality, and ease of management of Azure Data Services but hosted on your own infrastructure. This allows you to get all the latest Azure Data innovations, elastic scaling, and a single pane for all your data workloads with or without a direct connection to the cloud.
Being able to host your own PaaS services, no longer worrying about patches, upgrades and utilising system managed backups but still being able to manage those services from the Azure Portal and utilise Azure Monitor and Security systems will be appealing to many organisations who cannot fully migrate to the cloud or who want the ability to move to a different cloud provider in the future.
This service is in Public Preview and evolving all the time but in this session we will explore the current capabilities so you can understand what the service is able to offer.